It has been roughly eleven months since the last Schrödinger release, so this is indeed welcome news.

Don’t know what either Schrödinger or Dirac are? Dirac is an advanced royalty-free video compression format, initially developed by the UK’s BBC Research and Development team. To quote from the recent release announcement:

“Schrödinger is a cross-platform implementation of the Dirac video compression specification as a C library. The Dirac project maintains two encoder implementations: dirac-research, a research encoder, and Schrödinger, which is meant for user applications. As of this release, Schrödinger outperforms dirac-research in most encoding situations, both in terms of encoding speed and visual quality.”

That last sentence is really important. Previous testing by Stream0 showed that while Schrödinger was a much faster implementation than Dirac Research, the quality suffered enormously. If indeed Schrödinger has now surpassed Dirac Research in quality terms, this is exciting news.

Further information regarding enhancements in this release, and plans for a more regular release cycle, are available on the Dirac Video website.

With the increasing acceleration of HTML 5 acceptance, it’d be fantastic to see more browser support for Dirac, alongside Ogg Theora, as an alternative to the currently almost ubiquitous Flash/H.264 combination.